You could say I’m just a
seventeen-tabs-open,
sprawl-of-papers-on-my-desk
kind of girl.
I could say it, too,
because it’s true.
Some of the time.
Most of the time.
But not all the time,
and certainly not at my best times.
If I asked you to describe yourself
in five words, or five hundred,
either way,
would you describe your best self,
or your most self?
There are differences between mode, and mean, and average,
and the truth.
Which one will you be?
It’s up to one of the yous.

Watching my husband and his brother
struggle the 2015-sized refrigerator
through the 1902-sized doors,
I hear this song:
“Works for everything that’s handed to her,
never once complained.”
Maybe the song is about us.
Except at the moment it’s just the guys doing the work
while I think about how we seem to get ourselves
into predicaments a lot.
This time there was a solution:
unbolt all the doors and
lay them on the couch, the chair, the rug,
and lean them up against the counter
and the house itself.
It fit, just barely, and took it’s place in our kitchen.
There is also a dishwasher, which was also given,
but which was also a piece of work
with a pipe cleaner and a dental pick.
And the faucet, which turned out to need a part
that could be found nowhere in town
but could be fabricated,
by Ryan, at the end of a long day,
out of a paperclip.
Everything in our kitchen, a gift.
The mixer: free for the fixer;
the blender: just bring it to Bogotá and back;
the hot water: works for the one who works for it;
the staircase: finders keepers;
the stove: came with the house and apparently a mouse;
the stuff: a small prize for getting rid of lots of other stuff.
I look out the window and there’s the pile of pavers,
which we would have paid for with sweat,
except that it was too cold for that on the rainy autumn day
we dug them
literally
out of the dump.
“Works for everything that’s handed to her,
never once complained.”
I’ve complained a time or two,
but not about the working
or the things handed to me,
but maybe about how life goes too fast
and it’s often hard to have supper on time
and hard to get to bed on time.
But I’m thinking,
maybe I should just say thank you.

They always asked, “Is he growing?”
and “Is he sleeping well?”
until he evidently was.
And then no one ever asked,
“Are you, by chance,
giving your baby steroids
and sleeping pills
just so we’ll stop
asking?”
No, no one ever asked that.